How To Start a FinTech Company While Learning To Code

In this interview I speak with Rachel Carpenter, founder of Intrinio. Intrinio is a FinTech company that allows other companies to purchase financial data at greatly reduced prices. Intrinio gives many FinTech startups a chance to compete with larger financial firms and venture backed startups who can afford to buy their financial data from traditional vendors like big banks.

Rachel started Intrinio with her co-founder Joseph French. Joseph was a multi-talented financial professional / coder who had some good ideas for apps in the FinTech space. Rachel, recognizing his talent decided to partner up with him in order to build one of the product ideas they had come up with.

Rachel's first hurdle was to teach herself to code. After decided to work with Joseph, he made it clear that she would need to code if they were going to build a product together. Fast forward over a year and the two co-founders had their first working demo for a software product that would automate much of the costly process of getting a valuation for a company.

The only problem was the data that Rachel and Joseph would have to buy to run their product was going to cost them 60,000 USD per month. Traditionally, the major financial data vendors sold large packages for large enterprise company. Their was no vendor for small startups that needed select pieces of financial data for specific purposes, like automating company valuations.

Rachel and Jospeh realized the need for a system to purchase financial data a la carte. They built a system to aggregate the data they needed and started selling it to other startups and financial firms. Today, many startups that could not have existed prior to Intrinio's data aggregation system are able to purchase deeply discounted data in order to provide their customers with very specific services. In fact, Intrinio now has its own marketplace for applications built using their data feeds.